This is an ongoing archive and blog of reviews and commentary by W.L. Swarts!

Monday, January 1, 2018

Utterly Average: Hershey's Gold Peanuts & Pretzels Candy Bars.

The Good: Does not taste bad, All right ingredients, AffordableThe Bad: Not particularly flavorful, Not superlative in any wayThe Basics: Hershey's Gold Peanuts & Pretzels chocolate bars are worth trying once, but hard to want to stock up on or try a second time.

Late last year, it made the news that Hershey's was releasing its first new candy bar in more than two decades. So, as the new year begins, I figured it was about time to try it. Hershey's Gold Peanuts & Pretzels candy bars are the first new candy bar since, it appears, I graduated from high school. And given that amount of time, I would have figured Hershey's would have made a candy bar that felt indispensable. Sadly, the Hershey's Gold Peanuts & Pretzels is not that candy bar. The Hershey's Gold Peanuts & Pretzels candy bars are all right, but not exceptional in any way.

Basics

Hershey's Gold Peanuts & Pretzels chocolate candies are a full-sized candy that is made up of nine connected segments. A full candy bar is five and three-eighths inches long, two and one-eighth inches wide and one-quarter inches thick. Each of the bars comes individually wrapped in a tan plastic wrapper. It is worth noting that while I usually rail against the environmental impact of such things, it is hard to imagine these Hershey's chocolate candies not wrapped. This keeps each one clean, unmelted and intact.

The 1.4 oz. Hershey's Gold Peanuts & Pretzels candy bar tends to run in the $1.00 range. These are an average-priced candy bar!

Ease Of Preparation

These are candy, so preparing them is as simple as opening the wrapper. There is no grand secret to eating Hershey's Gold Peanuts & Pretzels chocolate candy. The bar has nine segments and they easily snap apart.

Taste

Each Hershey's Gold Peanuts & Pretzels candy bar smells like peanut butter. There is no real aroma of chocolate in the bouquet of the Hershey's Gold Peanuts & Pretzels candy bars.

The Hershey's Gold Peanuts & Pretzels candies taste sweet, like creamy caramel to begin with. The light caramel chocolate melts away to reveal the saltier, crispy flavor from the pretzels. The broken up peanuts in the Hershey's Gold Peanuts & Pretzels bar manifests more as a texture than a flavor, adding a little more salt and solidity to the soft, creamy bar. The flavors of caramel and salt dominate the Hershey's Gold Peanuts & Pretzels candy bars.

The Hershey's Gold Peanuts & Pretzels candies leave a slightly sweet, mostly salty, aftertaste in the mouth after the last of the bar is consumed. The salty and sweet aftertaste lasts for several minutes after the bar is consumed, but it is not at all unpleasant.

Nutrition

The Hershey's Gold Peanuts & Pretzels chocolate bars are candy, so it is tough to look at these for something nutritious and then blame them for not being overly nutritious. The primary ingredients in the Hershey's Gold Peanuts & Pretzels candy bars are sugar, vegetable oil and skim milk. There is nothing unpronounceable in these candies, save in - ironically - the enriched bleached flour!

A serving of the Hershey's Gold Peanuts & Pretzels chocolate candy is considered an entire 39 gram candy bar. From a full bar, one takes in 220 calories, with 14 grams of fat. There is virtually no cholesterol (5 mg in a full serving), surprisingly little sodium (85 mg of Sodium - 4% RDA), and there are no vitamins in these chocolate candy. There is, surprisingly enough, 3 grams of protein and 2% RDA of Potassium in a serving.

Honestly, these are candy and anyone looking to them for actual nutrition needs to get a reality check. These are not Vegan-compliant, nor are they recommended for anyone with a nut allergy as they have peanuts in them. These are not marked as kosher and they are not (apparently) gluten-free.

Storage/Clean-up

The bars of Hershey's Gold Peanuts & Pretzels chocolate candy remain fresh for quite some time. The bars of Hershey's Gold Peanuts & Pretzels chocolates we picked up a few weeks ago had an expiration date of September 2018, so they have a pretty decent shelf life. Given that these are chocolate and pretzels, one assumes that if they are kept in a cool, dry environment they will not melt or go bad. Because they are individually wrapped in a very sealed package, it is hard to imagine just what it would take for these to go bad outside melting and refreezing.

As for cleanup, one need only throw out the plastic wrapper in the garbage to clean up after the Hershey's Gold Peanuts & Pretzels chocolate bars. Outside that, there is no real cleanup needed, unless one is eating them in a hot environment. In that case, it is likely one would need to wash their hands. If these candies melt into most fabrics, they will stain. Getting them to melt is fairly easy, though.

Overall

Hershey's Gold Peanuts & Pretzels candy bars are nothing special, but they are not bad, either.